Mellanox Collaborates with VMware to Accelerate Applications in Virtualized Datacenters

LAS VEGAS, Aug. 28, 2018 -- Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX) today announced that it is collaborating with VMware to help customers make the performance of their storage systems more efficient. The solution will be previewed at VMworld 2017, with Mellanox iSER (iSCSI Extensions for Remote Direct Memory Access [RDMA]) networking solutions leveraging VMware vSphere. iSER uses an Ethernet Storage Fabric as a unified connectivity solution for compute and storage, thereby eliminating the need for Fibre Channel while providing improved performance at a lower cost. Preliminary benchmark results show that iSER accelerates storage throughput by more than 3x and IOPs by more than 2x when compared to ordinary iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface). In addition, it also enables 2x better efficiency versus Fibre Channel storage connectivity.

iSER is an industry standard protocol that uses RDMA technology to eliminate the network processing overhead, while preserving full compatibility with the widely used iSCSI protocol. Thus it enjoys the proven stability, resiliency, security, high availability and recovery benefits of iSCSI, which makes it an enterprise-ready storage networking solution. iSER uses high performance RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) NICs, over ordinary Ethernet networks without requiring lossless configuration. This allows cloud, storage, and enterprise customers to deploy iSER more quickly and easily while accelerating application performance, improving total infrastructure efficiency and reducing cost.

“Modern applications must be able to analyze large amounts of data in a very short amount of time,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president, marketing, Mellanox Technologies. “This requires both high performance and efficient storage systems with Ethernet connectivity, which makes iSER technology the ideal Ethernet Storage Fabric for today’s data centers.”

The VMware vSphere platform enables businesses to leverage virtualization to maximize performance, availability and efficiency for infrastructure and applications. vSphere serves as an ideal foundation for any cloud environment, allowing businesses to better utilize the underlying physical hardware resources across multiple systems and provides pools of virtual resources to the data center.

“VMware continues to add new capabilities to vSphere enabling it to be the next-gen infrastructure ready for next-gen apps,” said Mike Adams, senior director, Cloud Platform Product Marketing, VMware. “Enabling applications to achieve faster access to storage over iSER facilitates the use of Ethernet for networking, compute and storage. This can simplify customers’ experience with automation and management at scale and can provide an improved customer experience.”

“We are pleased to see the growing support for iSER technology in the marketplace,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO and co-founder of Zadara Storage. “We implemented iSER at the core of our Zadara Storage Cloud and have seen a 10x reduction in I/O latency, enabling our VPSA Storage-as-a-Service platform to perform better than traditional enterprise storage arrays.”

“In our testing, iSER significantly enhances data delivery, enabling applications deployed on virtualized infrastructure to realize more performance and lower latency from their data infrastructure,” said Marc Fleischmann, CEO and founder of Datera. “As a software-defined data platform that enables cloud-independent IT-as-a-Service models for enterprises and cloud-centric businesses, Datera customers can non-disruptively integrate new technologies such as iSER at their own pace.”

Demonstrations and presentations at VMworld 2017 U.S. (Aug. 27 – Aug. 30):
Visit Mellanox at booth #327 to learn about the benefits of using Mellanox’s 10/25/40/50/100 Gb/s Ethernet, RoCE and iSER on top of VMware vSphere.